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Recently, according to foreign media reports, a group of activists gathered in San Francisco, USA last Saturday to establish a non-violent citizen resistance organization called "Stop AI" (Stop AI). It is preventing the further development of artificial intelligence, especially for general artificial intelligence (AGI). OpenAI defines AGI as a highly autonomous system that transcends humanity in most economic value work, which the organization considers to be huge and dangerous and hopes to ban it completely.

Stop AI has published a series of goals on its website, including requiring the government to force AI companies to shut down all work related to the creation of general AI models, destroy existing models and permanently ban their development. However, they are not trying to ban all artificial intelligence, but only target those parts that threaten human survival.

Target the finger OpenAI

In terms of specific action strategies, Stop AI mainly expands its influence by organizing protests. For example, they have recently begun to "siege" OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco to protest. Previously, the group had held numerous protests in the OpenAI office and elsewhere. Among them, two co-founders, Sam Kirchner and Guido Reichstadter, were arrested for blocking the entrance to OpenAI in October last year.

Stop AI member Finn van der Velde, a security advocate and activist with a background in computer science and artificial intelligence technology, said that an international treaty may be needed to prevent AGI from appearing, and countries agreed Not developing AGI means dissolving companies like OpenAI that aim to develop AGI while simultaneously supervising computing power to prevent someone from training AGI models.

As amid the protests, there were also calls for further investigation into the death of former OpenAI employee and whistleblower Sunchir Balaji.

In November 2024, Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment. But Balaji's parents said they did not believe their son died by suicide and they wanted an external agency to investigate the cause of his son's death.

The parents of Balaji, 26, said they still have questions about the cause of their son’s death. They said Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26 with traces of suspected gunshot wounds. San Francisco police said it appeared to be a suicide incident and no evidence of the murder was found in the preliminary investigation. However, his mother said something was wrong in his apartment.

"The password drive is gone. His computer is broken. His desktop computer has been on for three days. Everything is messy," Poorn, Balaji's motherima Ramarao) said.

Balaji, who began working as an OpenAI researcher in 2020, publicly claimed that the company violated copyright laws when developing ChatGPT. His parents said he was called to testify in a case against OpenAI four days before his death.

Stop AI believes that Balaji's death may not be suicide but was killed, and the reason for the killing was to prevent him from telling the truth about the copyright issues of ChatGPT.

Stop AI mentions moral concerns about the AI ​​giant's seeking to create "super intelligence."

Who is Stop AI? What are you doing?

Stop AI, led by co-founders Sam Kirchner and Guido Reichstadter, has now protested outside the OpenAI office. On Saturday afternoon local time, Stop AI held a demonstration outside technology company OpenAI, fearing that the company's technology could lead to "human extinction." They set a bold goal to get support from 3.5% of the U.S. population, or 11 million people.

Stop AI members come from computer, machinery and mathematics related fields.

Founder Sam Kirchner has a background in mechanical and electrical engineering, while Reichstadter has worked as a jeweler for 20 years and received a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics. Other panelists also have some technical backgrounds: Finn van der Velde holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science, specifically artificial intelligence, and left the Master of Artificial Intelligence program at Radbergh University “to work on AI security,” as he LinkedIn profile shown. Derek Allen can program. Kirchner said Dennis, a part-time team member, is currently pursuing a master's degree in artificial intelligence.

Stop AI’s Sam Kirchner (left) and Guido Reichstadter at Silverstone Café

They firmly believe that human thinking should always be at the forefront of the field of intelligence.

Stop AI launched protests and citizen resistance to make the public informed that although San Francisco's AI technology company acknowledges that general AI has the risk of human extinction, it is still advancing related research and development. Some experts even predict that general artificial intelligence may be released this year. They stressed that artificial intelligence is extremely dangerous. The so-called artificial intelligence security is just a fantasy and cannot be proved through experiments that it will not cause ideas that harm humans, which is similar to the situation where humans once caused the extinction of other species. also,General AI can also cause permanent damage to democratic institutions, while leading to massive unemployment and causing many people to lose their lives.

The industry has different opinions on the development of artificial intelligence. Some people working in artificial intelligence believe that the development of general artificial intelligence/super artificial intelligence (AGI/ASI) can help solve problems such as cancer treatment and climate change. But Stop AI retorted that it is meaningless to conduct such research and development without ensuring that it is always safe and does not endanger human survival, after all, it is impossible to prove its safety from an experimental perspective.

At present, there are constant controversies regarding the research and development and restrictions of general artificial intelligence, and its future direction has attracted much attention from all walks of life.

It is worth mentioning that as of now, Stop AI has raised $6,685 in funds.

AI development is controversial: expectation coexist with fear

"…We are trying to permanently ban the development of general-purpose artificial intelligence (AGI)," Kirchner said in an interview with The Register. “Roughly speaking, AGI refers to systems that are more powerful than all human experts in all technology fields.”

AI master Geoffrey Hinton once predicted that artificiality will be done in the next 20 years The possibility of intelligence surpassing human intelligence is about 50%. Like other AI opponents, Kirchner is worried that humans will lose control.

Kirchner's concerns about the development of artificial intelligence are not an isolated case. Long before the big language model broke out, Elon Musk mentioned in 2014 that using AI is like "summoning" the demon...

In 2014, Musk said in a public discussion about the development of artificial intelligence: "I think we should be very cautious about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess what our biggest existential threat is, it would probably be this (AI) . ”

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, people's views on its potential impact have shown a polarization, with deep concerns and recognition of its positive role. Many people believe that consciousness is an extremely complex and unique phenomenon that artificial intelligence is difficult to reach. It is essentially just a machine for statistical calculations, lacking the ability to feel, emotions and understand. All behaviors are performed according to programs, which is completely different from humans having free will. Although there are endless debates about the “security” of artificial intelligence, many people are still confused about the specific scope of its security.

At present, people's concerns about artificial intelligence are mainly concentrated in two aspects. First, the ability of artificial intelligence to generate false content may bring serious harm. In the political field, false information is already rampant, and the intervention of artificial intelligence may make the situation worse, which will lead to legal problems. For example, innocent people are mistakenly accused of committing crimes, while guilty people use this to obtain absenteeism proof.;In the financial and economic field, fraud, extortion and other problems may also be caused. Moreover, there are many ways in which artificial intelligence can potentially harm society, and many still need to be discovered.

Secondly, artificial intelligence may lead to large-scale unemployment. Taking the Hollywood screenwriter strike as an example, screenwriters are worried that they will be replaced by AI-generated scripts, especially when their past works are used to train AI engines. Similarly, artists are worried that the images and music generated by AI will replace their creations. In addition, routine jobs like sporting event summary will almost certainly be taken over by artificial intelligence.

However, artificial intelligence has also shown great positive potential. In the medical field, artificial intelligence can help doctors diagnose diseases more accurately, predict the development trends of diseases, and even assist in the development of new drugs through the analysis of massive medical data. For example, some artificial intelligence systems can quickly identify abnormalities in medical images, improve the early diagnosis rate of diseases such as cancer, and gain valuable treatment time for patients.

In the field of transportation, autonomous driving technology, as one of the important applications of artificial intelligence, is expected to significantly improve traffic safety and efficiency. Through sensors and algorithms, autonomous vehicles can perceive their surroundings in real time, make faster and more accurate driving decisions, and reduce traffic accidents caused by human errors. At the same time, intelligent transportation systems can also optimize traffic flow, alleviate congestion, and reduce energy consumption.

At the moment when artificial intelligence technology is constantly innovating, how to balance its development with potential risks has become an important issue that the whole society needs to think about urgently.

Reference link: https://x.com/liron/status/1803435675527815302?t=GM7jv516WqvRAA_q4vEBzQ&s=19https://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-openai-whistleblower-want-outside-investigation-sons -deathhttps://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-openai-whistleblower-want-outside-investigation-sons-death